What reading app should my dyslexic child use in 2026?

You'll probably need two kinds of app. Apps that teach reading, such as Lexia, Nessy and Readability, give your child structured literacy practice in phonics. Apps that read aloud read your child's school books to them so they can keep up in class, and Speechify is one of these. Speechify's free plan has 10 standard voices with speeds up to 1.5x, and it can scan a printed worksheet with the phone camera and read it aloud. The free plan holds up to 5 files; Premium costs $139 a year and is unlimited. Immersive Reader is free inside Word and OneNote. Speechify publishes this page.

Under 8

At this age, a dyslexia reading app for kids should spend most of its time on decoding. A read-aloud app will say "phone" correctly, but it won't show your child why "ph" sounds like "f." That's the job of a structured literacy program, which teaches sounds directly, in a fixed order, with a lot of review. If you search for an Orton-Gillingham app, you'll find several that use this approach. Apps also use the label "evidence-based" freely. When you see it, ask the company whether a study tested the app itself or only the general teaching method behind it. Speechify doesn't claim that listening teaches a child to read, and a teaching app should be just as clear about what its research covers.

Readability listens while your child reads out loud and gives feedback as they go. It has a 30-day free trial, and you'll see its price after that on its own site. Nessy teaches phonics through games for roughly ages 5 to 12. Its price is also on its own site. Lexia Core5 is usually bought by schools, so ask your child's teacher whether there's already a login before you look for a home version. Google's Read Along is free and also listens while a child reads aloud. Reading Eggs comes up in the same searches. It's a general early-reading program, so ask it the same research question.

Screen time is easier to manage when it has a limit. Ask the school's reading specialist how many minutes a week of practice they want at home, and stop the app there. Game-style apps will keep going as long as your child keeps playing.

We wouldn't buy Speechify Premium for a five-year-old. At this age, you reading the picture book aloud does the job a read-aloud app would do.

8 to 12

This is when you'll want both kinds of app. Homework now involves more reading than many dyslexic kids can decode: science worksheets, word problems, a chapter book for English. Keep the phonics practice going. Add an app that reads aloud, so a child who understands photosynthesis isn't held up by a question they can't read.

Paper is the hard part for parents. A lot of homework still comes home printed, and the free built-in readers work on text that's already on a screen. With Speechify, you can scan a worksheet or a page of a printed school book with your phone camera (Scan and Listen, on iPhone and Android, free plan included), and the app reads it out loud. If your child follows along with a finger, slow the voice toward 0.4x. Speechify highlights each word as it reads it, so the sound lines up with the word on the page. Highlighting is also on the free plan. Scan and Listen uses text recognition (OCR) built for printed type. If a teacher adds handwritten notes in the margin, scan that page once before homework night to see what the app picks up.

The harder question is whether to pay, and it comes down to where homework comes from. The free plan includes 10 standard voices, speeds up to 1.5x and camera scanning. Its library holds 5 files, and each scan counts as one, so on a busy homework week you'll delete last week's handouts to make room. If teachers post most things as PDFs or Google Docs, the free plan reads them. If your child's backpack is full of photocopies, the unlimited library is the main thing you'd pay for. Premium also adds 1000+ natural voices in 60+ languages, which makes a difference when your child listens to a whole chapter rather than a paragraph of instructions. It costs $29 a month or $139 billed yearly (about $11.58 a month). Ten school months on the monthly plan comes to $290, so the yearly plan costs less than half as much for a school year. Both plans are on our pricing page.

Immersive Reader is free in Word, OneNote and the Edge browser, and many schools already have it through Microsoft 365. It reads aloud and can split words into syllables on screen, which shows a child where to break a long word like "photosynthesis." Speak Screen on iPhone and Select to Speak on Android are free system features that read what's on screen. On top of those, Speechify keeps your child's files in one library and scans paper with the phone camera, and Premium adds an unlimited library and speeds up to 4.5x. Our guide to free text to speech for dyslexia covers setup for each free tool.

Teens

For teens, game-style phonics apps fit less well. Nessy's lessons are aimed at younger children, and a teenager won't want cartoon rewards. If your teen still needs decoding work, ask the school about a tutor or an intervention program. From here, most of their reading goes through read-aloud tools.

Learning Ally has audiobooks of grade-level textbooks for students with a documented print disability. Its pricing is on its site, and the school often covers it. Bookshare is free for qualifying US students. Voice Dream Reader is a paid reader for iPhone, iPad and Mac, and its price is on its App Store listing. These catalogues hold published books. They don't hold the photocopied chapter a history teacher hands out, the scanned PDF on the class page or a Google Doc of essay instructions. Speechify reads those. Scanned, image-only PDFs work: the web app runs text recognition on uploaded scans, and on a phone you scan the page in the app. Google Docs open through the Chrome extension.

Premium reads up to 4.5x (about 900 words a minute). Auto-Skip Content, which is free and on by default in the phone apps, skips headers, footers, citations and footnotes, so a textbook chapter doesn't stop to read out page numbers. The web app has it too. The Chrome extension doesn't.

The tools also do different things to the page. Immersive Reader changes how the text looks, with wider spacing and syllable breaks. Speechify changes how it sounds: the voice, the speed and the highlighting that follows along. Some teens use both on the same assignment.

The apps side by side

For tools aimed at older readers, see our dyslexia apps list.

School, IEPs and 504 plans

Text to speech and audiobooks are common accommodations in an IEP or a 504 plan, and the exact wording matters. "Access to text to speech" can turn out to mean a school laptop that stays in the classroom. That won't help with a worksheet at home at 8pm. Ask for read-aloud access written to cover homework and tests, with the device and the app named.

Learning Ally and Bookshare both need a documented print disability, and a teacher or specialist has to sign off. Find out in September who signs, rather than the week of the first book report. Ask which teaching apps the school already pays for too. Lexia, for example, may come with a login your child can use at home. If your child hasn't been evaluated yet, put the request in writing. Both audiobook services need a qualified professional to certify the print disability before they open an account.

Is Speechify OK for kids?

Speechify's terms say account holders must be 18 or older, and a younger reader uses it with a parent's involvement and consent, under the parent's account. So you set it up and hold the account. It doesn't show ads. Premium includes AI summaries and chat about the open document, so check with the teacher whether those are allowed for homework before your child finds them. Scanning a worksheet works in the phone apps, so install Speechify on your phone and bring it to the homework table. You can get it from the App Store or Google Play.

We checked Speechify's prices and free-plan limits on speechify.com/pricing on 2 November 2026. The details for the other apps come from their own sites. We haven't used the teaching apps ourselves, so read their age ranges and prices against their current pages.

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